Sunday, January 27, 2019

Imagine that Dr. Fenn never invented electrospray ionization, and no one else was smart enough to come up with it either. This whole mass spectrometry revolution never happened, 'cause even if we all devoted all our time to MALDI or FAB or whatever, they'd never have the impact that directly coupling HPLC or CE directly to mass spectrometry has.

What if you wanted to do proteomics and you had all these fancy genomics/transcriptomics technologies to draw off of for inspiration. In this issue of "what if" Edman degradation is still a thing that is done all the time.

Maybe this is what you'd come up with....?

Is this kind of brilliant? Absolutely.
Am I scared to try and describe it beyond what is shown here? Yes.
Is it something that will replace our existing technologies? Not yet, obviously, but there is a lot of potential here and loads to think about!